Virtualization Career Training

On Tuesday, October 4th Technical Evangelists Symon Perriman and Rick Claus are hosting an online conference on Virtualization Career Training with Microsoft Learning. This half day virtual event (8am – 11am PST) will offer a Level 100 to 200 introduction for anyone who wants to learn more about Microsoft Virtualization and how it can help their career. It is free and public so sign up for this warm-up for the Jump Start event on October 6th.

· Module 1 – Technology: Learn about Microsoft’s virtualization technologies, how they work, and the future roadmap to the Cloud!

· Module 2 – Career: Understand the importance of virtualization and Private Cloud, and how it can make or break an IT Professional’s career!

Virtualization Exam 70-659 Training

On Thursday October 6th Technical Evangelist Symon Perriman and Technical Instructor Philip Helsel will host an online 8-hour deep dive training event for the Microsoft 70-659 Technical Specialist exam, Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization. This virtual event runs from 8am to 5pm PST and will include presentations, demos and live Q&A with the attendees. It costs $99 to attend, but includes a free exam voucher worth $150! It is public so sign up for some great training to help improve your career here: http://mctreadiness.com/MicrosoftCareerConferenceRegistration.aspx?pid=272. Register early to make the most of a weekly virtualization coaching newsletter!

Microsoft announced ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 R3 had RTM’d. R3, like R2 before it, is not a service pack. It is a new release level that requires new licensing (covered by software assurance). The deployment will require an update, described in KB977384. This hotfix is required for the following computers that are running System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2):

Primary and secondary site servers

Remote administrator console servers

Remote provider servers

Client computers

ConfigMgr 2007 R3 can be referred to as the power management release. Steve Rachui of Microsoft goes into some depth on this in a blog post. Long story short: You can audit and report on power utilization and costs in your organization. You can identify waste using these reports. Using collections, you can apply a power policy to Windows computers. Then you can compare your earlier reports with new reports to see how and what you have saved.

As Steve notes, there are some other changes:

Delta AD Discovery: Changes are picked up instead of doing a full discovery.

Dynamic Collection Updating: One of the time consumers in new deployments is the time required for collection membership update intervals. This new interval type is used in a few key scenarios where time is critical. MS is recommending sparse usage.

Pre-Staged Media: This is aimed at organizations who offload OS deployment to the OEM. Media can be created from your OSD and sent out to the likes of Dell who build your PCs OS in their factory.

I recently ran into a problem where MS NLB would converge the 2 node web cluster but would not respond to packets. the two nodes were VM’s on a 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster. If you moved the nodes to the same Parent Partition they would respond to traffic if the traffic was generated on the same virtual switch.

Went through the normal troubleshooting to make sure that MAC spoofing was enabled on the vNICs etc.

New to the environment was a Juniper EX-4200 Virtual Chassis the switch has IGMP-snooping enabled by default.

the NLB was setup to use a single vNIC with Multicast and IGMP, however the juniper switch was required to disable IGMP-snooping in order to allow unicast traffic to the multicast address.

The NLB IP address on the servers is assigned a Multicast address however the MAC is used for unicast traffic, the juniper switch was blocking the MAC address from entering the Layer2 forwarding table as it assumed it was a multicast packet form the MAC address.

Once we disabled IGMP-snooping on the transit switch the NLB IP was allowed to pass through the Juniper switch, however the confusing part is the MAC address never showed up in any of the forwarding tables of either the Cisco or Juniper Switches, how ever it did pass the traffic.

We all love the innovation enabled by virtualization, and the new options of computing form factors is even more interesting (to me). Yesterday saw something cool from LG, the electronics giant who helps me watch hockey, football and MadMen in HD. Allesandro wrote about it yesterday [here]. News coverage provided some context for the development work:

LG and Microsoft will also team up to introduce monitors for cloud computing, a technology that allows users to access data and software over the Internet. The cloud computing market is expected to expand to 12 million units in 2012, LG said.

The alliance will primarily target the market for virtualization solutions for educational institutions, aiming to become a leader in the segment with a 25 percent share in 2012. The segment is expected to grow by more than 50 percent every year, reaching 6 million units in 2012 and 20 million units in 2015, LG said

Yesterday, LG and Microsoft announced an agreement to collaborate on the development and marketing of the LG Network Monitor, a multi-user computing solution that will integrate with RemoteFX. Under the agreement, LG will introduce a new line of network monitors with RemoteFX in mid-2011.

An LG Network Monitor is a monitor that connects to a centralized desktop over the network. With a connected LG Network Monitor, all you need to get to your desktop and applications at work is a keyboard and a mouse – no PC. Multiple LG Network Monitor users can remotely access a complete Windows 7 desktop experience, hosted on the same computer enabled by Remote Desktop Services, running somewhere on the network.

If you have been following my blogs in the past, you know that I have been passionate about RemoteFX; however, I have been even more passionate about the excitement of all of our hardware and software partners for this technology and the efforts they are making to enable powerful, end-to-end RemoteFX solutions for our joint customers. With LG, it is no different: the prospect of seeing LCD displays in the market next year that will be enabled for RemoteFX decoding means that customers will have even more form factors to choose from when determining the right access device for a VDI or session virtualization environment: rich clients, thin clients, ultra-lightweight clients, and now also network monitors (did anybody say no clients ? ;-)).

OK you have a backup application performing backup of Hyper-V Virtual Machines, by utilizing the parent partition to backup the VM’s with the VSS writer.

You have the following conditions.

The backup server failed in the middle of the backup

The CSV volume son the Cluster remain in this mode “Online (Backup in Progress: Redirected Access)

When this happens you cannot manually move the CSV volume to another node, place the CSV in to maintenance mode or return the CSV to Normal mode.

What do you do?

Two possible solutions:

Live Migrate all of the VMs to another node and reboot the Node Owner of the CSV, this breaks the connection will place the CSV on a new node and return the CSV to Online

End Task or Restart the backup agent on the affected node this should return the volume to Online

But wait where id all of your space go the VSS writer and the backup agent are holding your space hostage. You now have to move the CSV to another node and back again for the VSS Writer/Agent to release the space back to the file system.

This took a fair amount of trouble shooting I hope this will save you some time.